But in all the hubbub of Helsinki winning the bid for the 75th WorldCon in Helsinki, Finland, 9-13 August 2017, there was the little thing about the name. I mean, consider the banner on the shiny new Worldcon 75 website -- we've got a cute but spare looking black-and-white wordless graphic of Major Ursa, the lady spacebear ***, and just the name "Worldcon 75". No other name, like Sasquan or Chicon 7:

Very quickly long-time Worldcon attendees noticed something different about it. The name of the convention is Worldcon 75. That’s it. No silly fannish name. No local focus. Just Worldcon. I love it.

Partly that’s because Worldcon has a long history of conventions that have seem themselves as far more important than the fact that they are Worldcons. It is, in a way, an artifact of the resolutely anti-authoritarian stance of WSFS, but it is also a result of jingoism by committees (and not just nationalist jingoism either, city and state pride comes into it too). Helsinki has, in effect, made a statement that it sees being a Worldcon as important, not as an annoying inconvenience. However, they also put out this tweet:

Given that Finland's national SF con is called Finncon and that Finnish can be a difficult language for much of the rest of the world -- no lazy Germanic or Romance roots to fall back on -- I actually like their choice. Also, since it's the 75th WorldCon -- the third Quarter Quell as one wag put it -- I think there's some real simple class there.

Of course, I haven't logged into my Twitter account in years, so depend on Twitter crossposts to get news -- and they haven't put their explanation on either their website or Facebook pages -- so I am providing this info here as a public service. Ole hyvä!

Anyway, I'm already bubbling and you know I can be easily amused. So there you have it. Worldcon 75.

Dr. Phil

*** -- I found the name of the bear on the Worldcon 75 Q&A Facebook Group via the Worldcon 75 Facebook page. Here's another illustration cropped from Sini Neuvonen's Facebook page:Remembering the armored intelligent fighting polar bears in The Golden Compass, I am not going to argue with a polar bear capable of going EVA in a spacesuit. (bear-faced-grin)